The Elegance of the Hedgehog. Muriel Barbery

law at Assas and sob into their Kleenex at Notting Hill – is a shock from which I can scarcely recover. And it is patently clear, for those who pay attention to chronology, that I am not the one who is aping these youngsters but, rather, in my eclectic practices, I am well ahead of them.

      Renée, prophet of the contemporary elite.

      ‘And well, why not,’ I thought, removing the cat’s slice of calves’ liver from my shopping bag, and from beneath that, carefully wrapped in an unmarked sheet of plastic, two little fillets of red mullet which I intend to marinate then cook in lemon juice and coriander.

      And this is when it all started.

       Profound Thought No. 4

      Care

      For plants

      For children

      There’s a cleaning woman who comes to our house three hours a day, but it’s Maman who looks after the plants. And it’s an unbelievable rigmarole. She has two watering cans, one for water with fertiliser, one for special soft water, and a spray gun with several settings for ‘targeted’ squirts, either ‘shower’ or ‘mist’. Every morning she inspects the twenty house plants in the apartment and administers the appropriate treatment to each one. She murmurs all sorts of stuff to them, oblivious of the outside world. You can say whatever you want to Maman while she’s looking after her plants, she’ll completely ignore it. For example: ‘I’m going to buy some drugs today and maybe try for an overdose’ will get you the following answer: ‘The kentia’s going yellow at the tips of the leaves, too much water, not good at all.’

      With this we grasp the opening tenets of the paradigm: if you want to ruin your life by not listening to what other people are saying to you, look after house plants. But that’s not all. When Maman is squirting water onto the plants, I can plainly see the hope that fills her. She thinks it’s a kind of balm that is going to penetrate the plant and bring it what it needs to prosper. It’s the same thing with the fertiliser, which she gives them by means of little sticks in the soil (in the mixture of potting soil, compost, sand and peat that she has made up especially for each individual plant at the nursery over at the Porte d’Auteuil). So, Maman feeds her plants the way she feeds her children: water and fertiliser for the kentia, green beans and vitamin C for us. That’s the heart of the paradigm: concentrate on the object, convey all the nutritional elements from the outside to the inside and, as they make their way inside, they will cause the object to grow and prosper. A little ‘pschtt’ on its leaves and there’s the plant ready to go out into the world. You look at it with a mixture of anxiety and hope, you know how fragile life can be, you worry about accidents but, at the same time, you are satisfied with the knowledge that you’ve done what you were supposed to do, you’ve played your nurturing role: you feel reassured and, for a time, things feel safe. That’s how Maman views life: a succession of conjuring acts, as useless as a ‘pschtt’ with the spray gun, which provide a fleeting illusion of security.

      It would be so much better if we could share our insecurity, if we could all venture inside ourselves and realise that green beans and vitamin C, however much they nurture us, cannot save lives, nor sustain our souls.

       10. A Cat Called Roget

      Chabrot is ringing at my lodge.

      Chabrot is Pierre Arthens’s personal physician. He is one of those ageing beau types who are always tanned, and he squirms in the presence of the Master like the worm he really is. In twenty years, he has never greeted me or even given the least sign that he was aware of my presence. An interesting phenomenological experiment might consist in exploring the reasons why some phenomena fail to appear to the consciousness of some people but do appear to the consciousness of others. The fact that my image can at one and the same time make an impression in Neptune’s skull and bounce off that of Chabrot altogether is indeed a fascinating concept.

      But this morning Chabrot seems to have lost all his tan. His cheeks are drooping, his hand is trembling and as for his nose…wet. Yes, wet. Chabrot, physician to the mighty, has a runny nose. And on top of that he is uttering my name.

      ‘Madame Michel.’

      Perhaps it isn’t Chabrot at all but some sort of extraterrestrial mutant assisted by intelligence services that leave something to desire, because the real Chabrot doesn’t clutter his mind with information regarding subordinates who are, by definition, anonymous.

      ‘Madame Michel,’ says Chabrot’s flawed imitation, ‘Madame Michel.’

      Well, we’ll find out. My name is Madame Michel.

      ‘A terrible misfortune…’ continues Runny Nose who, gadzooks, is sniffling instead of blowing his nose.

      Well I never. He’s sniffling noisily, expediting his nasal runoff to a place it never came from, and I am obliged, by the speed of his gesture, to witness the feverish contractions of his Adam’s apple working to assist the passage of said nasal secretion. It is repulsive but above all disconcerting.

      I look to the right, to the left. The hallway is deserted. If ET here has any hostile intentions, I am doomed.

      He takes himself in hand, repeats himself.

      ‘A terrible misfortune, yes, a terrible misfortune. Monsieur Arthens is dying.’

      ‘Dying? Actually dying?’

      ‘Actually dying, Madame Michel, actually dying. He has forty-eight hours left to live.’

      ‘But I saw him yesterday morning, he was fit as a fiddle!’ I am stunned.

      ‘Alas, Madame, alas. When the heart gives way, it’s like a bolt from the blue. In the morning you’re hopping around like a mountain goat and by evening you’re in your tomb.’

      ‘Is he going to die at home, he’s not going into hospital?’

      ‘Oh, Madame Michel!’ exclaims Chabrot, looking at me with the same expression as Neptune when he’s on his leash. ‘Who wants to die in hospital?’

      For the first time in twenty years I feel a vague flutter of sympathy for Chabrot. He is, after all, a human being too, I say to myself, and in the end, we are all alike.

      ‘Madame Michel,’ he says again, and I am astounded by this profusion of Madame Michels after twenty years of nothing, ‘a great many people will no doubt want to see the Master before…before. But he does not want to see anyone. With the exception of his nephew Paul. Would you be so good as to send the importunate boors on their way?’